Magnus Carlsen Is More Than An Odds-On Favorite To Win The World Chess Championship
By OLIVER ROEDER
11:54 AM NOV 6, 2014

The World Chess Championship Match begins Saturday in Sochi, Russia. Defending champion Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian wunderkind, will take on Viswanathan Anand, the former champion from India.

The match comprises 12 games. Players score one point for a win and half a point for a draw. First to six and a half points becomes champion. If the 12 games end 6-6, there will be tie-break games. The match could last until Thanksgiving.

Carlsen, the 23-year-old world No. 1, is favored to beat Anand — but just how big a favorite is a complicated question. And the betting market may be underestimating Carlsen’s chances.

Anand is the world No. 6 and qualified by winning the Candidates Tournament in March. He has been a grandmaster since 1988 — two years before Carlsen was born. But Carlsen, a former child chess prodigy, has since achieved the game’s highest rating ever. His official FIDE Elo rating eclipsed Anand’s for the first time in 2008, when Carlsen was just 17.

Around here, we use Elo ratings to analyze to a lot of things — the NFL, the Women’s World Cup, Scrabble. I’m going to take the analysis back to its source: chess.

As I write, Carlsen’s Elo rating is 2863. Anand’s is 2792. As such, Carlsen is expected to take slightly more than 0.6 points from each game, in the form of wins and draws.1 (Wins are worth one point, draws a half-point.) But the Elo system does not address the specific win-draw ratio that can be expected. For example, an expectation of 0.6 points per game could mean an expectation of 0.6 wins and zero draws, or 0.5 wins and 0.2 draws, or 0.4 wins and 0.4 draws, and so on. So, to calibrate a forecast of the match, we’ll have to make an important assumption. To inform this assumption, let’s dig a bit deeper into the prevalence of draws.

Full article here.

Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
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